A love of films, a love of narratives...I

No, I won't talk to you of the blockbusters, or if I do forgive me my accidental propensities of liking the same things that everyone likes. Because I don't like or dislike things based on what others did or are likely to do: free from such mind-crunching mental calculations, I simply like or dislike things. I am not going to talk here of LOTR or Matrix or even how vulnerable and desirable Jessica Lange looked in the palm of King Kong: because not only did Lange failed to excite me, but even the King Kong seemed a little pointless, and already a harbinger of all those dinosaurs, sharks and goblins that Hollywood was going to unleash in full force from the late 1980s.

It was a hot afternoon many, many years ago, and there was a little boy glued and simply fascinated by the story of a girl who could transform into a flowering tree at her will: Girish Karnad's Cheluvi was my best fairy tale. Because it was also sad. And I felt it not to be a fairy world: set in the Gersoppa, it told me that anything can happen in this world, and there is no need to imagine a world hanging with tinsel stars for that.

Today, when the boy meets the girl, it is not just about the sex they will have at the first closed-door opportunity, it is more about the sex they already sold their lives for earlier and now meet as sad drifters, wearing masks, removing masks, and finally wearing one of death. Or it could be mon amour in hiroshima, when the mask is that of grief, deliberate, of love itself, because to be in mourning protects you and then you need not go out to the world, you need not remind yourself of the distinct unglamorous possibilities that lie behind: a japanese married man who never met her before? maybe, one should get tired of it all and just hallucinate 81/2 dreams, and finally masturbate himself to death?

Keaton tried to do everything to get a good camera reel: but he could never do it. Why Buster always outwitted Charlie? The answer is as moot or as easy to find as the explanation behind Gish's terror: was it really the wind or was it the men's brutality or was it something still to be explained? By whom? The cameraman has already showed the sparse landscape even better than johnny belinda could have seen, the actress has already again outwitted Charlie, and the scripts and the directors are not going to be found anywhere near a nikita, would they be?

So I searched for an answer: I thought that mon oncle would really provide me that, but that proved to be a repetitive show with m. hulot getting stuck like a gramophone record in his vacances. I crashed through the undergrowth like c.ra.z.y but my answers were perhaps more likely whistled on the bridge on the river kwai or told by a lonely candle's watch watched only by zhivago and me. There are times when all this witticism doesn't help: when I wanted to see how the women could form a panchayat and get a school and a new sanshodhan could happen in some dirty power politics; when I thought I would have seen all the films since the postman rang twice on marital infidelity, yet i was caught by surprise one day to see a maria conchita alonso do the role with more aplomb than ava gardner could have done even after a night with the iguana; maybe if there could be a man who overcomes all odds--his own personal weaknesses--to win a medical negligence verdict against a missionary institution and big hospital, there could also be children of a lesser god who run on koyla and remain in khamoshi and are never talked about. Maybe one should just turn on the gaslight...